Bottom Line Saves keeps old iron running.

We fix the systems everyone else gave up on, or more accurately, the systems some integrator already told you to give up on, right before quoting you a number with more zeros than your original system had transistors.

If your business runs on hardware or software older than most of your employees, and it just broke, call us before you burn the whole budget on a "rip and replace" project some integrator's been dying to sell you since the Clinton administration.

We Do the Impossible

Business about to go under because one piece of custom hardware died and some integrator quoted you seven figures to replace your entire stack? For us, that was Tuesday. Also Wednesday. Probably next Tuesday too.

When everybody else tells you it can't be done, or that you need to rewrite the whole thing from scratch (funny how that's always their answer, and always their invoice), we go straight to the bare metal: the lost assembly code, the undocumented protocols, the stuff nobody wrote down because they figured it'd never matter again. It matters. We keep your business running instead of feeding it into someone else's replacement-hardware margin.

Silicon Archaeology & Hardware Reverse Engineering

When some dead custom ASIC or proprietary chip craps out with zero documentation left behind, we don't guess, and we definitely don't tell you it "can't be sourced anymore" and hand you a catalog. We open the thing up.

We de-encapsulate the die, put it under a microscope with enough magnification to make you dizzy, and start micro-probing until we can read the ROM mask and trace out the logic gates by hand. Add in logic analyzer traces and some old-fashioned bus snooping, and we can reverse-engineer just about any piece of hardware anyone was ever dumb enough to leave undocumented — clone it, emulate it, or bring it forward into this century.

Yes, We Hate Integrators Too

Back in 1997, a family-run machine shop was two bad days from closing its doors. A piece of custom hardware running their machinery was on its last legs, and every integrator they called saw the same thing: a business with no options, which in integrator math means a business you can charge whatever you want. One of them actually said "you don't have a choice" out loud, like that was a selling point.

An old lady from the family's church mentioned her middle school aged grandson, "really into those chips," always taking radios apart he didn't own, and asked if he could just take a look. Nobody expected much. He borrowed a microscope from his school, spent the next two weeks camped out next to a dying machine, and mapped the entire board by hand. Then he rebuilt it in software, including the buggy timing quirks in the original firmware, because the machinery had been calibrated around those bugs for a decade and "fixing" them would've broken everything downstream.

That kid founded Bottom Line Saves. He still enjoys nothing more than watching an integrator's quote get sliced down to a fraction of the original, right in front of the client who was about to sign it.

What We Actually Do

Legacy OS Development & Maintenance: DOS, 16- and 32-bit Windows (3.x, 9x, NT), OS/2, UNIX System V, DEC VMS, Solaris. If it still boots, we still support it.
Architecture Modernization: P2V and V2V virtualization to get your creaky old hardware running safely on modern servers or in the cloud, without breaking whatever it was doing in the first place.
Hardware-Free Operations: Pulling the plug on dead copy-protection dongles (parallel, serial, early USB) for software whose vendor closed shop a decade ago.
Source Code Recovery: Decompilation, reverse engineering, and binary patching when the source got lost, deleted, or walked out the door with an ex-employee.
Custom Firmware & Driver Engineering: New low-level drivers and microcontroller firmware so your ancient OS can talk to modern peripherals, network storage, and USB gear it was never built to understand.
Embedded & Real-Time OSes: VxWorks, QNX, early embedded Linux, the kind of thing running quietly inside industrial gear, medical devices, and telecom equipment that nobody's thought about in twenty years.
Proprietary Mainframes & Minicomputers: IBM AS/400 (IBM i), DEC PDP-11, Data General Nova.
Industrial Control Software: PLC ladder logic, SCADA systems still limping along on Windows CE or Windows Embedded, and CNC control software from the era before anyone called it "legacy."

The World Is Our Workshop